FOR STARTERS.

If You Paid Full Price, You Didn't Buy It At Cirobe

November 27, 1994|By Jeff Lyon.

"The book of my enemy has been remaindered," a poem by literary critic Clive James gloats fiendishly. To most of us, remaindering is synonymous with public failure, with producing "unbudgeable turkeys," as James calls them. But Chicagoans Brad Jonas and Marshall Smith want to do for remaindered books what Goodyear did for blimps. Give them a good name.

Four years ago, Jonas, of Powell's used-book stores, and Smith, who specializes in selling remainders, conceived the Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Book Exposition (CIROBE), a trade show dealing entirely in unsold and bargain books. Held this year in the Chicago Hilton & Towers, the show drew 1,800 book store owners who sampled day-old bread from 200 publishers.

Tables groaned beneath the likes of Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock," at $6.98, "Citizen Koch," at $2.98, "The Letters of T.S. Eliot," at $5.98, and decent editions of Twain and Whitman, priced to move. Dealers like Fred Bass, of New York, sought to make a killing. "I got 2,000 copies of Time-Life books on the occult," Bass crowed. "They retail at $15.95, I got 'em for $2.75, and I'll sell 'em at $7.95."

"This is not junk," Jonas argues. "The idea that a book is only remaindered if it's bad is untrue. A great book can be remaindered if the publisher sold only 145,000 of a 150,000 press run and needs to sell the last 5,000 to avoid paying storage." When the IRS nixed depreciating them, warehoused books became hot potatoes.

Still, there was some junk at CIROBE, validating James' glee at seeing his enemy's book next to "Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots-One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment."